


willing to fall, hoping to fly

by livtontea



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Future Tense, Gen, No Beta, References to Shakespeare, Sort Of, other references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-01-31
Packaged: 2021-02-25 16:08:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22498840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livtontea/pseuds/livtontea
Summary: He will go where no man has gone before—where no man is supposed to go.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 14





	willing to fall, hoping to fly

**Author's Note:**

> quick future tense practice :)

He will go where no man has gone before—where no man is supposed to go. He will open his eyes to realize that the world has turned to rubble around him. He will, he will. So many things that he will come to regret await him.

Five—our Romeo without a Juliet, our starring role, in this instance—will stumble through ruins, catching himself as he trips. His family back home will wonder, _Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou_? But he won't answer. He'll bury them instead, one last good deed done unto them; post-mortem. After death. He won't know how they died—won't suspect who was the catalyst of the apocalypse. His sister will mourn her sanity accompanied by a sad violin, and he will not hear her. He'll listen to the crackling of the fires instead—and he'll be alone.

He’ll wander the ruins, thinking, this is not how he imagined the end of the world. He’ll brush his hair out of his eyes at night, damp with sweat after a day spent searching for food and anything that could be useful to him, because there will be nobody there to do it for him. He will long for the cool touch of his mother. While he is there, at the end of ends, he will long for many things.

These things, these longings, he has taken them for granted all his life, but they will be torn from him like a tablecloth being torn from under a vase—and he will wobble precariously before tumbling to the floor and shattering into hundreds of crystalline pieces.

But children, children know—glass shattered is far more dangerous than it is whole. Five will become a pile of shards on the floor; broken and scraped together as best as he can do. He will become the pieces of glass in little Kai’s eyes, blinding him and turning his gaze evil and bitter. In this instance, he will become both the glass—and Kai.

The boy. The Boy. They are one in the same—yet worlds apart. He will be the boy—stuck in a never-ending hell, trapped in what is the product of his own arrogance. He will be, and for now, is The Boy—a machine fashioned from the finest lies, a soldier built from studies and tests and promises that it can always be worse. A child, is what he is, and will be, and both the boy and The Boy are. Five is both—somewhere down the line, he will be neither.

He will live his life, or rather, survive—all alone. A curious fact is, humans are social creatures. Humans want, no, _need,_ they _require_ other people—and he will go years without even one.

If you will ask him, he will say that isn’t true: _falsehood,_ he will declare. _I have her._ But he will not have her—and he won’t be willing to admit to it, but he will be alone. All alone.

His rickety wagon will make a soft rattling noise as he drags it across rubble. The things inside of it will look on bravely, ignorant of the fires around them. She will look on bravely, and they will both be ignorant—she will be ignorant by nature, and he will be ignorant by choice.

Will it be a choice? After all, it will be survival. A mechanism to keep himself sane, the very existence of which proves that he might just be too far gone.

Five will make a promise. To himself. Standing over his family’s graves, he will swear on everything he knows that he will get back to them. It will be dry—it will be raining ash. It will be a multitude of things, because in times of need, a promise is what will keep him going. Toward the end, he will have made the same promise hundreds of times.

Years will pass. He will first grow taller and stronger, then slowly start shrinking, his back hunching and his hair growing in white. He will never wither—somebody who will have gone through as much as he will can’t just _wither away._ He’ll be old—he’ll be wise. As wise as he can get with the everything around him, as wise as the world will let him. Dolores will still be by his side, and he will still talk to her like she is more than something he found in the fire.

He will stay away at night, gun in hand, staring blankly at the decade-old numbers scrawled in the paper of his sister’s book. Night after night after night, Five will find himself stumped. Dead end.

A woman in black will appear in front of him, and he won’t shoot her. Her lips will stretch in a picture-perfect smile, red lipstick only a couple shades lighter than blood. She will offer him a job—an opportunity. He will take it, because he won’t have any other choice.

After what will feel like years and years of gritting his teeth and pulling the trigger, he will make it back home. But everything will be different. Everything… will be different.

His siblings will be older. His brothers will be missing one. His father will be gone. His family will be falling apart, nobody there to hold it together.

He will almost burst into tears right there in the courtyard, because that will not be what he wanted. But he will know—he can’t be weak again. Weak is what will have gotten him into this mess, is what he will think, and he’ll walk into the house first—hiding his puffing eyes and wiping stray tears on his oversized sleeve.

He will, he will, he will. Five will do so many things, and lose so much in the process. But for now, he is a boy asleep in his bed, brow creased in a slight frown as he dreams of neon.

**Author's Note:**

> thoughts + tips always welcome! i hope you liked it! :)


End file.
